Your work on Inheritance and Performance is very stimulating. Keep the comments coming. I will comment over the weekend.
One thing to remember, in our volatile age, is that the kinds of emotions that Hemans releases in her poems, while very much
central to the discourses of entertainment in our own culture, are disruptive and upsetting. They sometimes emerge from fear, desperation, anger,the threat of or actualization of trauma, but they also emerge from other forms of strong feeling like devotion, love and its complex attachments, fidelity, allegiance, etc. All of these emotions and the effect they have on the way we perform ourselves are complex, and as a culture I am not sure that
we are very good at engaging in the kinds of regulation that help people to manage the effects of strong emotion. Resentment, on of the most corrosive emotions other than jealousy, is often left unchecked and untreated, and this can create serious problems for people in their domestic lives. professional lives, and (although less so in this country than in others) their political lives. I'll leave responses to that thought open to you.
I mention this because we are beginning a novel of regulation, Mansfield Park, and for those of you who have not yet read the novel, the pace might be a little slow. Should you become frustrated, remember that as academics we spend a lot of time reading and that reading is an important form of emotional and imaginative regulation that affects our domestic situations in important ways.
One of the central differences between Romanticism and 18th century poetry (I'll leave the 18th century novel -- with its dramas of virtue, honour, public performance in the private sphere,corruption, and titillation -- out of the picture for a moment) is that it created room for peopling what Samuel Taylor Coleridge calls in "Frost at Midnight," "the interspersed vacancies of thought." The idea that the imagination could bring us closer to people, could transform our relations with one another, and could actually "people the world" differently through the experience (imaginative though it was) of freedom, was Romanticism's transformative legacy to the world. This was particularly important for British women writers, since the relationship between home and nation changed profoundly as a result of Romantic thought about the imagination :) A woman, girl, man, or boy of any age, could engage in the spirited attachment to far off places. A growing body of literate people could connect home and nation and see the home as an extension or even revision of the nation. By responding to rapidly changing political and class formations, Romantic women writers were at the vanguard of the transition away from the last gasps of feudalism that the many debates in Parliament, in newspapers, in journals (public and private) that literate people could follow and consider. Hemans writes to that moment; she creates it as a lived experience that is both emotional and intellectual. Her enthusiasm is part of her curiosity, and she uses powerful emotions to make specific scenes from history memorable.
One question for us is "what do we do with those powerful emotions?" How do they help us reimagine the world? What kind of moral web or map do they create for us as we learn far more history than we learned in school ...?
One last thought -- The intractability of poverty was a significant concern in such an optimistic age, and while some Romantic writers, especially de Stael, William Wordsworth and William Blake focused on poverty in physical and imaginative terms, others like Hemans directed their attention to spiritual poverty and plenitude. This will be of concern to us next week.
When we begin Mansfield Park, for example, we will look carefully at the idea of "improvement" that underlines Mrs. Norris's and Lord Bertram's decision to foster Fanny at Mansfield Park.
On Thursday and in Week 4 when we consider Victorian responses to and reflections on Romanticism, we will be able to get a clearer sense of how the Victorian period represented an extension of, not a rebellion against or repudiation of, some of the major forms of public identity for women that we saw in Corrine.
Your work on Inheritance and Performance is very stimulating. Keep the comments coming. I will comment over the weekend.
One thing to remember, in our volatile age, is that the kinds of emotions that Hemans releases in her poems, while very much
central to the discourses of entertainment in our own culture, are disruptive and upsetting. They sometimes emerge from fear, desperation, anger,the threat of or actualization of trauma, but they also emerge from other forms of strong feeling like devotion, love and its complex attachments, fidelity, allegiance, etc. All of these emotions and the effect they have on the way we perform ourselves are complex, and as a culture I am not sure that
we are very good at engaging in the kinds of regulation that help people to manage the effects of strong emotion. Resentment, on of the most corrosive emotions other than jealousy, is often left unchecked and untreated, and this can create serious problems for people in their domestic lives. professional lives, and (although less so in this country than in others) their political lives. I'll leave responses to that thought open to you.
I mention this because we are beginning a novel of regulation, Mansfield Park, and for those of you who have not yet read the novel, the pace might be a little slow. Should you become frustrated, remember that as academics we spend a lot of time reading and that reading is an important form of emotional and imaginative regulation that affects our domestic situations in important ways.
One of the central differences between Romanticism and 18th century poetry (I'll leave the 18th century novel -- with its dramas of virtue, honour, public performance in the private sphere,corruption, and titillation -- out of the picture for a moment) is that it created room for peopling what Samuel Taylor Coleridge calls in "Frost at Midnight," "the interspersed vacancies of thought." The idea that the imagination could bring us closer to people, could transform our relations with one another, and could actually "people the world" differently through the experience (imaginative though it was) of freedom, was Romanticism's transformative legacy to the world. This was particularly important for British women writers, since the relationship between home and nation changed profoundly as a result of Romantic thought about the imagination :) A woman, girl, man, or boy of any age, could engage in the spirited attachment to far off places. A growing body of literate people could connect home and nation and see the home as an extension or even revision of the nation. By responding to rapidly changing political and class formations, Romantic women writers were at the vanguard of the transition away from the last gasps of feudalism that the many debates in Parliament, in newspapers, in journals (public and private) that literate people could follow and consider. Hemans writes to that moment; she creates it as a lived experience that is both emotional and intellectual. Her enthusiasm is part of her curiosity, and she uses powerful emotions to make specific scenes from history memorable.
One question for us is "what do we do with those powerful emotions?" How do they help us reimagine the world? What kind of moral web or map do they create for us as we learn far more history than we learned in school ...?
One last thought -- The intractability of poverty was a significant concern in such an optimistic age, and while some Romantic writers, especially de Stael, William Wordsworth and William Blake focused on poverty in physical and imaginative terms, others like Hemans directed their attention to spiritual poverty and plenitude. This will be of concern to us next week.
When we begin Mansfield Park, for example, we will look carefully at the idea of "improvement" that underlines Mrs. Norris's and Lord Bertram's decision to foster Fanny at Mansfield Park.
On Thursday and in Week 4 when we consider Victorian responses to and reflections on Romanticism, we will be able to get a clearer sense of how the Victorian period represented an extension of, not a rebellion against or repudiation of, some of the major forms of public identity for women that we saw in Corrine.